We didn’t see much rain today. The airport got .06″ and I had .02″ of rain in my rain gauge. Today was a lot cooler only getting to 73. Saturday will begin to warm up and by Sunday we should be back to normal, the low to mid 80s.

Sorry no winner in this weeks quiz. The question was: In the 1996 movie “Twister” a device called “Dorothy” was used to study how tornadoes function. There was a real device used in early tornado research. What was it called?

Here is the answer: In the movie “Twister,” the chasers are trying to deploy something called “Dorothy” that consists of a large number of instrument packages inside plastic “bubbles” that will send data about the tornado back to the chasers. The container holding these sensors looks to be modeled after a real instrument package called “TOTO” (for TOtable Tornado Observatory) that was developed by Dr. Al Bedard of ERL in Boulder. The idea was for a chaser to put TOTO down in the path of a tornado so that data from the passage of the tornado would be recorded on magnetic tape. TOTO was roughly the size of a 55 gallon oil drum and was designed to stay put (hopefully) during the passage of a tornado. For a number of years, it was carried about during storm chases by Prof. Howard Bluestein of the School of Meteorology, University of Oklahoma. Then, TOTO was given to NSSL to attempt deployment. All these efforts were essentially unsuccessful because it is difficult to put objects in the path of a tornado! Only once was TOTO put nearly into the tornado path; that particular chase effort is “immortalized” by the PBS “NOVA” program on tornadoes that aired first in 1986.

There will be another quiz next week starting Monday. Good Luck.